What lies behind Donald Trump’s nomination victory? Received wisdom among conservatives is that he, the outsider, sensed, marshaled and came to represent a revolt of the Republican rank and file against the “establishment.”

This is the narrative: Republican political leaders made promises of all kinds and received in return, during President Obama’s years, major electoral victories that gave them the House, the Senate, 12 new governorships and 30 statehouses. Yet they didn’t deliver. Exit polls consistently showed that a majority of Republican primary voters (60 percent in some states) feel “betrayed” by their leaders.

Did these RINOs repeal Obamacare? No. Did they defund Planned Parenthood? No. Did they stop President Obama’s tax-and-spend hyperliberalism? No. Whether from incompetence or venality, they let Obama walk all over them.

But then comes the paradox. If insufficient resistance to Obama’s liberalism created this sense of betrayal, why in a field of 17 did Republican voters choose the least conservative candidate? A man who until yesterday was himself a liberal. Who donated money to those very same Democrats to whom the Republican establishment is said to have caved, including Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton.

Trump has expressed sympathy for a single-payer system of socialized medicine, far to the left of Obamacare. He lists health care as one of the three main federal responsibilities (after national security); Republicans adamantly oppose federal intervention in health care. He also lists education, which Republicans believe should instead be left to the states.

As for Planned Parenthood, the very same conservatives who railed against the Republican establishment for failing to defund it now rally around a candidate who sings the praises of its good works (save for the provision of abortion).

More fundamentally, Trump has no affinity whatsoever for the central thrust of modern conservatism – a return to less and smaller government. If the establishment has insufficiently resisted Obama’s Big Government policies, the beneficiary should logically have been the most consistent and most radical anti-government conservative of the bunch, Ted Cruz.

Cruz’s entire career has consisted of promoting tea-party constitutionalism in revolt against party leaders who had joined “the Washington cartel.” Yet when Cruz got to his one-on-one with Trump at the Indiana OK Corral, Republicans chose Trump and his nonconservative, idiosyncratic populism.

Which means that Indiana marks the most radical transformation of the political philosophy of a major political party in our lifetime. The Democrats continue their trajectory of ever-expansive liberalism from the New Deal through the Great Society through Obama and Clinton today. The Republican Party, the nation’s conservative party, its ideology refined and crystallized by Ronald Reagan, has just gone populist.

It’s an ideological earthquake. How radical a reorientation? Said Trump last week: “Folks, I’m a conservative. But at this point, who cares?”

Who cares? Wasn’t caring about conservatism the very essence of the grass-roots revolt against the so-called establishment? They cheered Cruz when he led the government shutdown in the name of conservative principles. Yet when the race came down to Cruz and Trump, these opinion-shaping conservatives who once doted on Cruz affected a Trump-leaning neutrality. And Trump won.

True, Trump appealed to the economic anxiety of a squeezed middle class and the status anxiety of a formerly dominant white working class. But the prevailing conservative narrative – of anti-establishment fury – was different and is now exposed as a convenient fable. If Trump is a middle finger aimed at a Republican establishment that’s abandoned its principles, isn’t it curious that the party has chosen a man without any?

Trump lauds his own “flexibility,” his freedom from political or philosophical consistency. And he elevates unpredictability to a foreign policy doctrine.

The ideological realignment is stark. On major issues – such as the central question of retaining America’s global pre-eminence as leader of the free world, sustainer of Western alliances and protector of the post-World War II order – the Republican candidate stands decidedly to the left of the Democrat.

And who knows on what else. On entitlements? On health care? On taxes? We will soon find out. But as Trump himself says of being a conservative – at this point, who cares?

As of Tuesday night, certainly not the Republicans.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post. He can be contacted at:

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Sidney Bob

His article says it all. He lives in the 1%’s fantasyland of lies and misrepresentation. Republican voters still need to struggle to put food on the table. They finally have had enough and are beginning to realize the professed “conservative” values are based on fictions designed to reward the 1%.

PortlandGenXer

The Republican party left the sensible conservatives behind a long time ago.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

sequoiaqueneaux

Um, Republicans just chose the most elitist, spoiled, entitled, handed-everything-his-whole-life-and-who-has-no-understanding-of-the-middle-class buffoon in the nation! No.

Dave matteson

And the democrats steal from the middle class to give to the poor, lazy and illegals to buy their votes and as there are more poor, lazy and illegals than working middle class it’s a successful business model for them.

notspot

Indeed. Eat the poor, feed the rich.

theophiluser

Trump even jokes about the intelligence of his supporters when he says he could shoot somebody in broad daylight in Times Square and they’d still vote for him.

MainelyMom

They have only themselves to blame – they adhered to an amazingly narrow mindset for decades that was exclusively focused on pandering to a belief that the upper middle class should not have their incomes eroded and squandered on the less fortunate through taxes. These policies were going to keep the money where it belonged with those who earned it and they in turn would bring the necessaryy reinvestment that would turn the wheels of our economy. Not on your life. A caller on C-Span this morning put it bluntly: “companies (and those that run them) do not give a damn about America or Americans and have never prioritized business decisions based on what would benefit the environment, the country or its citizens”. But lets give them another tax break.

somainecoast

In the past, the suggestion of a Trump presidency was laughed at by just about everyone. Why aren’t his current supporters seeing that he’s the same clown now that he was then?

RedFaced1

The reason Donald Trump did so well with Republican primary voters is because many Republican primary voters are racist. This isn’t rocket science.

If they supported the candidate that lowered their taxes the most, Cruz would have been their guy. If they want to support true libertarian values, Paul would have been their guy. If they wanted to win, Rubio would have been their guy.

Trump has an uphill electoral battle ahead of him. It should get pretty interesting from here on out.

kenindy

Krauthammer, in his obvious distress, clearly explains the imminent demise of the GOP. Dead, by its own hand.

Good riddance! The party that left me can rot.

Perry Platt

I’m thinking “demagoguery” would be a better word than populism.

jadane

Mr. Krauthammer, even by your standards, this is incoherent. GOP has been feasting on delusional faux-populism since the Reagan years. If GWB can be portrayed as “jes’ folks”, why is the appeal of a vulgar reality-show host surprising? And how is Cruz now a Constitution-lover? Does that document suddenly not include the First Amendment?

Harry Balsagna

When Charles Krauthammer dies, his autopsy will show he is completely full of excrement. I would say this only figuratively, but he is so full, I think it may spill through to a literal translation. The “conservatism” of Mr. Krauthammer is a far cry from the conservatism of old. The conservatism that would draw broad support is the conservatism which wanted to keep government out of people’s lives, not embrace the Patriot Act. The conservatism which captialism was an economic game where anyone had a fair shot, not the crony capitalism where a select few are afforded opportunity. The FISCAL conservatism, where if you wanted a government program, politicians had the courage to pay for it, not mortgage our future.

The conservatism of Mr. Krauthammer is really a THEOCRASY. It is a monarch defined by by old money. Folks who have been abandoned by his party have chosen the lesser evil. By no means am I a fan of Hillary Clinton, but at least we will not be a mockery for the world.

Now I know the jist of the article is “How could we abandon Ted Cruz?” Ted Cruz is 10 times more crazy than Donald Trump.